The winner of the 2017 Sunburst Award for Adult Fiction is Spells of Blood and Kin by Claire Humphrey (Thomas Dunne Books).

The Sunburst Jury noted, “In her debut novel, Claire Humphrey shows us a world of magic existing in the shadow of Queen Street bars and down side streets lined with old houses in Toronto. When Lissa Nevsky’s grandmother dies, she inherits the old world magical practices and an old obligation that comes trailing a dark history of violence and bitterness. In cool, elegant prose, Humphrey’s novel gives us a fresh take on magic, exploring the gifts it can bestow and the price it exacts. Humphrey’s use of a real, contemporary Canadian setting and her refusal to allow her characters any easy victories set this novel apart from a field of strong competitors.”

The other shortlisted works for the 2017 Adult Award were:

Ami McKay, The Witches of New York [Knopf Canada]

Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants [Del Rey]

Jo Walton, Necessity [Tor Books]

Robert Charles Wilson, Last Year [Tor Books]

The 2017 winner of the Sunburst Award for Young Adult Fiction is Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard by Jonathan Auxier [Puffin Canada].

The Sunburst Jury commented: “Sophie Quire and the Last Storyguard (volume two in the Peter Nimble series by Jonathan Auxier) is a surprisingly complex take on age-old themes. Intrepid heroes, vivid villains, and an array of fantasy characters interact in a plot that places the importance of storytelling at its heart. It’s a metafictional adventure about the power (and limits) of story that, despite its invocation of well-worn tropes and its echoes of classics of children’s fantasy, still manages to be both surprising and gripping (and very funny) in its long, intricately-plotted narrative. It celebrates pure storytelling pleasure and refreshingly avoids any didactic moralizing.”

The winner of the 2017 Sunburst Award for Short Story is “The Sailing of the Henry Charles Morgan in Six Pieces of Scrimshaw (1841)” by A.C. Wise (initially published in The Dark, Issue 14).

The Sunburst Jury commented:“In an ingenious twist on the “found manuscript” trope, the narrative develops through pictorial vignettes inscribed on whalebone, baleen, and a rib of mysterious origin, minutely described as if for a museum catalogue or forensic report. Wise’s story is eerie, subtle, and highly visual, with pleasurably chilling overtones of Lovecraft’s Innsmouth abominations. Although individual characterization is virtually eliminated by the unique form and the distanced, objective narrative, it still succeeds in frightening and engaging the reader.”

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Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 15 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’
If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.